"Soapy Sam" takes on Darwin

On June 30, 1860, T.H. ("Darwin's Bulldog") Huxley and Samuel ("Soapy Sam") Wilberforce met at Oxford to debate the concepts put forward in Charles Darwin's recently published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, an encounter that is often celebrated even though the details of the event are lost to history. The famous debate was not the first time that Wilberforce publicly aired his criticisms of Darwin, though, as Wilberforce penned a detailed review of Darwin's famous book that raised a number of objections to evolution still heard from the creationist camp today.

Wilberforce begins his review with oblique praise of Darwin's "carefulness as an observer" and "imaginative sagacity," but it is easy to see that Wilberforce is avoiding praise of any of Darwin's ideas as much as he possibly can. After such formalities are established, Wilberforce attempts to cut the legs out from beneath Darwin's theory of natural selection, his tone becoming increasingly antagonistic as the review wears on. There is little doubt that there is a "struggle for existence" that "lead[s] the strong to exterminate the weak," Wilberforce writes, but this fact of nature only explains why the strongest members of a population become the progenitors of the next generation. Such selection appears to be too weak to produce any new form, and selection stabilizes rather than changes forms according to Wilberforce. This is evidenced by the fact that despite years of breeding pigeons have always been pigeons and the mummified animals brought back to Europe by the French were identical to living forms despite there age, therefore refuting the possibility of change from one form to another.

Domesticated animals are one thing, but Wilberforce becomes harsher when he comes to Darwin's suggestion that nature can exert selective forces on wild animals, causing them to change over time;

We think it difficult to find a theory fuller of assumptions; and of assumptions not grounded upon alleged facts in nature, but which are absolutely opposed to all the facts we have been able to observe.

Indeed, Wilberforce asserts that nature is always weeding out deviations and variations to maintain the basic "type" of a species and (in the tradition of Cuvier's sublimation of characters) no part or trait can be changed without sacrifice to another part. Even when variations might be present, natural selection could never "raise the individual ... above the typical conditions of its own species." To Wilberforce, variation in nature does not exist, and if it does it is not significant enough to "raise" those organisms up to a higher level that he would expect (even though Darwin described evolution as a branching, not linear, process).

After a short treatment of Darwin's own worries about transitional fossils and a lack of fertile hybrids, Wilberforce decides to lay into Darwin on philosophical and religious grounds;

In the name of all true philosophy we protest equally against such a mode of dealing with nature, as utterly dishonourable to all natural science, as reducing it from its present lofty level as one of the noblest trainers of man's intellect and instructions of his mind, to being a mere idle play of the fancy, without the basis of fact or the discipline of observation.

This is strange being that Wilberforce praised Darwin's powers of observation previously, but during this time in the history of science those who were deemed armchair theorizers had scorn heaped upon them, and it appears as if Wilberforce is levying a similar charge against Darwin. Clothing Darwin as a magician, Wilberforce charges the naturalist with "bursting the limits of time" in a negative sense, confusing what is possible given enough time with what is observed. Even more egregious, though, is that Darwin extended his argument to include humans;

Mr. Darwin writes as a Christian, and we doubt not that he is one.We do not for a moment believe him to be one of those who retain in some corner of their hearts a secret unbelief which they dare not vent; and we therefore pray him to consider well the grounds on which we brand his speculations with the charge of such a tendency. First, then, he not obscurely declares that he applies his scheme of the action of the principle of natural selection to Man himself, as well as to the animals around him. Now, we must say at once, and openly, that such a notion is absolutely incompatible not only with single expressions in the word of God on that subject of natural science with which it is not immediately concerned, but, which in our judgment is of far more importance, with the whole representation of that moral and spiritual condition of man which is its proper subject-matter. Man's derived supremacy over the earth; man's power of articulate speech; man's gift of reason; man's free-will and responsibility; man's fall and man's redemption; the incarnation of the Eternal Son; the indwelling of the Eternal Spirit, - all are equally and utterly irreconcilable with the degrading notion of the brute origin of him who was created in the image of God, and redeemed by the Eternal Son assuming to himself his nature.

After denigrating Darwin by mentioning that Richard Owen and Charles Lyell reject "transmutation," Wilberforce decides to end his review with charges of speculation gone wild. Darwin has ignored the facts of nature, says Wilberforce, and because he has done so he can creature any past or future that he likes. Still, Wilberforce offers very few facts himself, merely arguments from authority and the assurance that there is no variation in nature (even though this contradicts some of his own passages!).

If we were to believe Wilberforce, it would seem that Darwin's theory is found wanting in every aspect to a great degree, and many of the same arguments still appear in creationist writings. Natural selection is real, they say, but it is not powerful enough to cause the creation of a new type or species of organism. Darwin spent much time attempting to correct this mistake, and in his later book Animals and Plants Under Domestication he makes it plain that the power of natural selection cannot be neglected (even if, as he once wrote to Asa Gray "Your imagination must fill up very wide blanks.");

Some authors have declared that natural selection explains nothing, unless the precise cause of each slight individual difference be made clear. If it were explained to a savage utterly ignorant of the art of building, how the edifice had been raised stone upon stone, and why wedge-formed fragments were used for the arches, flat-stones for the roof, &c.; and if the use of each part and of the whole building were pointed out, it would be unreasonable if he declared that nothing had been made clear to him, because the precise cause of the shape of each fragment could not be told. But this is a nearly parallel case with the objection that selection explains nothing, because we know not the cause of each individual difference in the structure of each being.

[A copy of Wilberforce's review is collected in the book Adam or Ape.]